What caught my eye from this week’s lecture was Apollinaire’s Calligrams. Calligrams emerged in response to the movement of Futurism; that disrupted the need for typographic rules of layout and focused on speed and sound. Calligrams in themselves are lines and paragraphs of text arranged into the visual elements from the text.
The Calligrammes are an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph. (Guillaume Apollinaire, in a letter to André Billy) Continue reading “History of Design – Apollinaire and Calligrams”
